Panograph photography: how to make on-trend, ‘low-tech’ panoramas

A panograph is like a low-tech panorama, but as we show in our latest Photoshop Elements tutorial, its characteristic fragmented, home-made look can produce some fascinating pictures.

What is a Panograph?

Regular panoramas are good for photographing scenes which are too wide to capture with a single shot. With today’s photo editing software it’s possible to assemble the individual frames so that the joins are invisible. But in a ‘panograph’, there’s no attempt to hide the joins. Indeed, the fact that the picture is made up of individual photos is celebrated.

It sounds like a technically inferior way to take panoramas, but panographs turn the scene into a kind of impressionistic mosaic, with fragments of life passing before the lens in a series of changing moments.

Buildings don’t quite join up, pedestrians are chopped in half or appear in more than one frame, and there’s so much more to occupy your eyes as you unravel the fractured details in the scene.

Panographs are easy to shoot. JPEGs are fine, auto exposure is ideal, and auto White Balance is too. With a regular panorama, you need to shoot every shot on manual to be sure there are no variations in tone or colour between frames, but here all these variations are welcome. Some panographers even modify individual frames to exaggerate the differences.

There are two things you need to do to get your panograph right. You shoot a scene as a series of overlapping images and it’s crucial that you don’t leave any gaps.

If you do, your software will have a hard time matching them up later, and while you can do this manually, it’s laborious. You also need to stop your software from trying to produce a ‘perfect’ panorama.

We’re using the Photomerge tool in Photoshop Elements, and there are some specific settings you need to use to make this panograph effect work.

Both of these things are simple to get right, though. Panography is such an interesting technique – it’s a low-tech approach that delivers fascinating images.

How to shoot your panograph

01 Auto everything
This is a technique that doesn’t rely on precise camera settings! We’re using auto exposure and auto White Balance and are shooting JPEGs set to the S (small) size – the panograph will be big enough once it’s assembled, and higher resolutions will slow your computer down.

02 Shoot to a plan
This technique relies more on judgement than technical know-how. You need to look at the scene you want to photograph and mentally split it up into a grid so that shoot the overlapping frames systematically. It’s easier than it sounds once you get into a routine.

03 Mind the overlap!
This is how we shot our panographs, starting from the top-left corner, shooting a row of images left to right, then dropping down to shoot another row of images from right to left, then starting another row from left to right and so on. The frames need to overlap by around a third.

04 Manual focus
We’ve left most of our settings on auto, but if your scene contains subjects close to the camera, it can look odd if the focus changes between frames. In these situations, focus on the background, then flick the focus switch on the lens to the M position to lock the focus.

QUICK TIP
This makes a fantastic technique to use for holiday shots, showing familiar buildings and landmarks in a new way.

How to assemble your panograph

01 Open all frames
Start by opening all the images for your panograph in Elements. You can see them here in the Photo Bin (bottom).

02 Open Photomerge
Go to Photomerge > Photomerge Panorama – it’s on different menus in different versions of the software.

03 Photomerge settings
Click Add Open Files, check Collage, left, and deselect all the boxes under the list of files.

04 Merge process
Now wait! Photoshop carries out the merging process quite quickly, but it can take a while in Photoshop Elements.

05 Tweak your layers
You end up with a panograph where each frame is on its own layer, so you can adjust or move them individually.